Detection and Measurement of Railway Expansion Gap with Image Processing

Rail transportation systems are a type of transportation that is widely used in passenger and freight transportation. Accidents in this type of transportation, which is widely used, cause serious loss of life and property. In order for the railway operation to be carried out regularly, maintenance must be done regularly. When maintenance is done manually by experts, mistakes can be high and take a long time. The control of the railways that are used continuously should be done rapidly at certain periods. For this reason, rail defects can be detected using recently developed image processing algorithms. In this study, the images obtained from the railway line with the help of drone were pre-processed in the MATLAB environment, and the expansion gaps left intentionally between the rails and the rails were determined and measured. Since the acquisition of images using drones is independent of train services, it provides an advantage for detecting and repairing rail faults beforehand. It was shown that healthy results were obtained by giving the measurements that were analyzed graphically in the experimental results.